Motivation

 

The Web Server Survey has run since August 1995, exploring the internet to find new web sites. At the end of each month, an HTTP request is sent to each site, determining the web server used to support the site, and, through careful inspection of the TCP/IP characteristics of the response, the operating system.

 

Over the last two years there has been significant growth in the internet's DNS, fueled by rife domain name speculation, falling registration prices, easier and more efficient administrative procedures, and widespread publicity. It has become more common practice for companies offering internet registration services to place a template site on the web for each domain that they register.

 

Additionally, some hosting service companies find it convenient to create new sites at the time of customer signup, rather than at the point at which the customer is prepared to place real, personalised content on to the web.

 

So, whereas in the early days of the web, hostnames were a good indication of actively managed content providing information and services to the internet community, the situation now is considerably more blurred, with the web including a great deal of activity, but also some considerable quantity of sites untouched by human hand, produced automatically at the point of customer acquisition by domain registration or hosting service companies.

 

The biggest domain registries are large enough to be significant even in the context of the 17 million sites found by the June 2000 Web Server Survey. For example, register.com host some 1.4m domain names, the great majority of which are template sites. Network Solutions have a system hosted at Digex which hosts around 750,000 template sites for domain name holders. These two domain name registries presently account for about 12% of the hostnames found in the Web Server Survey.

 

Additionally, many companies will register in more than one domain. For example, Netcraft holds the netcraft.com, netcraft.net, and netcraft.co.uk domains, and currently uses three hostnames that will resolve to the Netcraft site.

 

This means that there are nine names in the DNS that will resolve to the same content;

 

www.netcraft.com, netcraft.com, ssl.netcraft.com, www.netcraft.net, netcraft.net, ssl.netcraft.net, www.netcraft.co.uk, netcraft.co.uk, ssl.netcraft.co.uk,

 

Circa 1996-7, the number of distinct IP addresses would have been a good approximation to the number of real sites, since hosting companies would typically allocate an IP address to each site with distinct content, and multiple domain names could point to the IP address being used to serve the site content.

 

However, with the adoption of HTTP/1.1 virtual hosting, and the availability of load balancing technology it is possible to reliably host a great many active sites on a single [or small number of] ip addresses. For example FreeServe has around 150,000 sites hosted on four load balanced IP addresses. These are substantially all active sites produced by real people crafting HTML in FrontPage, Word, Netscape, text editors, etc.

 

This all begs the question as to how many active sites there really are on the web.

 

Source: http://survey.netcraft.com/index-200007.html#active

 

 

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